Back in July, Veronique de Rugy of the Cato Institute considered the costs of Trump's anti-immigration agenda, and finds them exorbitant.

The gist of this well-argued and alarming piece:

...STEM students who stay in the U.S. after graduation "patent new inventions at four times the rate of typical college graduates and are responsible for around 10 percent of all new inventions patented in the United States. They found high-growth startup companies at six times the rate of US-born graduates."

That means we can dispense with the idea that if a foreign engineer gets a job, an American engineer must have lost one. Protectionism applied to human capital relies on the same economic fallacy that underlies other forms of protectionism: the belief that the economy is like one pie, and hence, allowing foreign interests to take a seat hurts those already at the table.

Economies don't work that way. Talented people don't merely fill existing jobs. They create them by inventing products, starting companies, conducting research, and making the people around them more productive. In the process, they create opportunities for other people that otherwise wouldn't exist.

Giving a cold shoulder to foreign students is particularly absurd when you consider Washington's obsession with competing against China. Politicians insist that America is engaged in an existential technological race. They spend billions of dollars subsidizing semiconductors and other favored industries. They develop elaborate industrial policies intended to make America dominant in artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and advanced manufacturing.

Then, when a potentially brilliant young scientist from India, China, or anywhere else earns an advanced degree at an American university and wants to stay and contribute to the American economy, our government says perhaps they should leave.

You can throw billions of taxpayer dollars at a semiconductor factory in Arizona. You cannot manufacture genius through an appropriations bill. [bold added]

Economists have managed to put the cost in dollar terms:

[D]iscouraging just one-third of international STEM graduates could leave the American economy 0.7 percent to 1.3 percent smaller, or roughly $200 billion to $400 billion in GDP over a decade -- equivalent to losing the entire economy of Utah or South Carolina.

This is bad enough, but de Rugy correctly warns of higher, intangible costs that American patriots should appreciate.

I think the piece does a good job of both demolishing the ludicrous "fixed pie" view of the economy protectionism is based on and offering positive arguments in favor of making immigration safer, legal, and more common.

I would recommend it to anyone genuinely curious about whether immigration is a good thing -- a question many people can be forgiven for asking these days, thanks to the full-court press of nativists of late.

-- CAV